The Formation of the Federal Reserve
The Early History of America’s Central Banking System
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Narrated by:
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David Van Der Molen
About this listen
Debates over paper money and banking are older than the United States of America itself. Eighteenth and 19th century Americans were deeply ambivalent about paper money and central banks, and political fights over these issues were among the bitterest in American history. In fact, controversies over the country’s central bank birthed both the first (1792-1824) and second (1828-1852) party systems. Frequently, policymakers crafted responses to the crisis at hand, and as a result, they implemented policies that were inadequate to the challenges the country faced in the future.
When the national capital relocated to Philadelphia from New York City, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton set to work on his second major task: the creation of a national Bank of the United States. Hamilton's Bank of the United States was to be privately operated, but owned in part by the federal government. Hamilton hoped to strengthen the economic centrality of the federal government by allowing the bank to issue loans, mint currency, handle government funds, and issue treasury notes, but as with Hamilton's proposal to assume the public debts, Southerners opposed the “bank bill.” They thought it gave excessive powers to the federal government at the expense of the states, and Hamilton’s most ardent political opponent, Thomas Jefferson, had other reasons to oppose the bill. Always a fan of agriculture, Jefferson saw the bank as no friend of farmers, figuring it was geared exclusively towards helping urban businessmen improve their fortunes. To some extent, Hamilton wouldn't disagree with this assessment: he thought the United States was destined not to be a Jeffersonian agrarian nation, but a large industrial one.
The First Bank of the United States had been one of the original issues that helped form the political rift between Hamilton and Jefferson that created the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, but it had been re-chartered even with a Democratic-Republican in office in the early 19th century. However, when Andrew Jackson was in office in the summer of 1832, he vetoed the bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, whose current 20-year charter was up. Much as Jefferson opposed the First Bank of the United States, Jackson thought the bill benefitted rich Northern industrialists, not the common man on the frontier. Nicholas Biddle, the bank's president, tried to mobilize support in Congress to pass the bill over the president's veto, but his attempt failed, creating a national controversy over the unsettled status of the country's central bank.
Jackson wanted to kill the bank altogether. To do so, he decided to remove all federal government deposits from the bank, so on September 10, 1833, after his reelection, Jackson ordered that all federal government deposits be removed from the bank. Led by Senator Henry Clay, the Senate censured President Jackson, the first time in history a president was censured, but Jackson also had some supporters.
As this early history suggests, ambivalence toward central banking and paper money, combined with the ad hoc nature of policymakers’ responses caused severe problems. These issues came to a head during the Panic of 1907, which provoked a major reassessment of America’s banking system. Progressive Era reformers like President Woodrow Wilson walked a tightrope, balancing fears of centralized wealth with the undeniable need for a rational mechanism to help govern the country’s economy. The system they created represented half a loaf, its many compromises and weaknesses corrected by the response to two other crises: the Great Depression and the Cold War. The Federal Reserve System that has existed since the Accord of 1951 has cooled the passionate conflict over central banking and rendered obsolete many of the monetary questions that so animated Americans in previous centuries.
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-
Story
Wall Street is an unending source of legend - and nightmares. It is a universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of economic prosperity and the basest impulses of greed and deception. Charles R. Geisst's Wall Street is at once a chronicle of the street itself - from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant - and an engaging economic history of the United States, a tale of profits and losses, enterprising spirits, and key figures that transformed America into the most powerful economy in the world.
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Many books in one; best linking of stories, eras
- By Philo on 03-23-14
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Russia's Crony Capitalism
- The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy
- By: Anders Aslund
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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This insightful study explores how the economic system Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia works to consolidate control over the country. By appointing his close associates as heads of state enterprises and by giving control of the FSB and the judiciary to his friends from the KGB, he has enriched his business friends from Saint Petersburg with preferential government deals. Thus, Putin has created a super wealthy and loyal plutocracy that owes its existence to authoritarianism.
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great book, so so narration
- By Rob on 05-20-19
By: Anders Aslund
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American Default
- The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle over Gold
- By: Sebastian Edwards
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that, when in a bid to pull the country out of depression, he depreciated the US dollar in relation to gold, effectively annulling all debt contracts. American Default is the story of this forgotten chapter in America's history.
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Superb
- By Jean on 12-08-18
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FDR's Folly
- How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression
- By: Jim Powell
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster.
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Scones for the Tea Party
- By Chiefkent on 06-11-12
By: Jim Powell
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Collusion
- How Central Bankers Rigged the World
- By: Nomi Prins
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In this searing exposé, former Wall Street insider Nomi Prins shows how the 2007-2008 financial crisis turbo-boosted the influence of central bankers and triggered a massive shift in the world order. Packed with tantalizing details about the elite players orchestrating the world economy, Collusion takes the listener inside the most discreet conversations at exclusive retreats like Jackson Hole and Davos. A work of meticulous reporting and bracing analysis, Collusion will change the way we understand the new world of international finance.
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Fair history survey, lazy characterizations
- By Philo on 05-09-18
By: Nomi Prins
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The Alchemists
- Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
- By: Neil Irwin
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in, of all places, Stockholm, Sweden, in the 17th century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world, from its troubled beginnings to the age of Greenspan, bringing the listener into the present with a marvelous handle on how these figures and institutions became what they are.
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Couldn't Listen to this narrator
- By Donald on 07-23-13
By: Neil Irwin
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An Empire of Wealth
- The Epic History of American Economic Power
- By: John Steele Gordon
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout time, from ancient Rome to modern Britain, the great empires built and maintained their domination through force of arms and political power. But not the United States. America has dominated the world in a new, peaceful, and pervasive way - through the continued creation of staggering wealth. In this authoritative, engrossing history, John Steele Gordon captures as never before the true source of our nation's global influence: wealth and the capacity to create more of it.
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KNOW YOUR HISTORY!
- By CP Guy on 12-22-20
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Putinomics
- Money and Power in Resurgent Russia
- By: Chris Miller
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In Putinomics, Chris Miller examines the making of Russian economic policy since Vladimir Putin took power in 1999. Miller argues that Putin's economic strategy has functioned far more effectively than most Westerners realize. While acknowledging that part of Putin's successes - above all, quadrupling per capita GDP in just a decade and a half - can be attributed to cashing in on high oil prices, Miller details the government policies that have also been fundamental to Russia's growth.
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Go find something better
- By Anonymous User on 08-04-21
By: Chris Miller
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America's Bank
- The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve
- By: Roger Lowenstein
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force of historical reportage, America’s Bank illuminates the tumultuous era and remarkable personalities that spurred the unlikely birth of America’s modern central bank, the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed is the bedrock of the financial landscape, yet the fight to create it was so protracted and divisive that it seems a small miracle that it was ever established. For nearly a century, America, alone among developed nations, refused to consider any central or organizing agency in its financial system.
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Important and Intriguing
- By Jean on 11-02-15
By: Roger Lowenstein
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An Extraordinary Time
- The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
- By: Marc Levinson
- Narrated by: James Foster
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A sweeping reappraisal of the last sixty years of world history, An Extraordinary Time describes how the postwar economic boom dissipated, undermining faith in government, destabilizing the global financial system, and forcing us to come to terms with how tumultuous our economy really is.
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Good review of crucial turning point in history
- By Philo on 11-22-16
By: Marc Levinson
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JFK and the Reagan Revolution
- A Secret History of American Prosperity
- By: Lawrence Kudlow, Brian Domitrovic
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Who invented supply-side economics - the idea that cutting tax rates can result in more growth, more prosperity at all income levels, and even more tax revenue flowing into the IRS? Most people would credit the economic team that advised Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But in fact supply-side economics came of age two decades earlier. And the first president who embraced it was one of the biggest icons of the Democratic Party - John F. Kennedy.
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Turn the speed up to 1 1/2 to 2 times
- By B. MIDDLETON on 09-15-16
By: Lawrence Kudlow, and others
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Why Save the Bankers?
- And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis
- By: Thomas Piketty, Seth Ackerman - translator
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Thomas Piketty's work has proved that unfettered markets lead to increasing inequality. Without meaningful regulation, capitalist economies will concentrate wealth in an ever smaller number of hands. Armed with this knowledge, democratic societies face a defining challenge: fending off a new aristocracy. For years Piketty has wrestled with this problem in his monthly newspaper column, which pierces the surface of current events to reveal the economic forces underneath.
By: Thomas Piketty, and others
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New Deal or Raw Deal?
- How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America
- By: Burton Folsom Jr.
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In this shocking and groundbreaking new book, economic historian Burton Folsom, Jr., exposes the idyllic legend of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a myth of epic proportions. With questionable moral character and a vendetta against the business elite, Roosevelt created New Deal programs marked by inconsistent planning, wasteful spending, and opportunity for political gain---ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America needed.
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A must listen!
- By Book and Movie Lover on 06-14-09